"Did you know Verizon spent $67 million on environmental projects in New England in 2012 alone?," Tomer Binyamin of Greenvolved asked quizzically. "Don't you think it's too bad no one knows about that?"
This is one of the issues Binyamin's company, Greenvolved, is trying to solve. The team launched their website only a few short months ago with the goal of helping non-profits and NGOs get support from both large enterprises and the general public.
"Big companies are sponsoring environmental projects and they are trying to get the message to spread as wide as possible, but it doesn't work," Binyamin, who is Greenvolved's co-founder and VP of business development, told BostInno. "Sometimes companies spend five times as much on marketing that doesn't work than they actually donate to the cause and they get no ROI. "
The way Greenvolved goes about fixing this issue is by first allowing NGOs and non-profits to post projects on their website free of charge. Users can then vote on their favorite projects rather than having companies come up with and dictate the projects themselves. However, projects need to hit a critical mass of votes in order to be picked up by a company.
"We are trying to be an intermediary. We ask 'What kind of projects do people like?' And we want people to say what they want so companies know which projects to do," explained Binyamin.
Everybody wins: The NGO gets visibility for their work, the enterprise gets visibility for their brand and more money can go directly to an environmental cause rather than a marketing budget.
The latter of these three advantages, according to Binyamin, is the most important because non-profits don't have very big marketing budgets to begin with. Plus, spending too much money on the wrong marketing strategy is what often kills ROI for big companies.
"The bottom line is, we are trying to make it less risky for big companies so we can direct more support to environmental causes," said Binyamin.
Greenvolved has a week left on their Thunderclap campaign, which you can contribute to here. The team isn't asking for donations. They want you to give just a few minutes of your time to help with their trending projects such as shark conservation legislation in Australia or rainforest preservation in Peru.
Check out Greenvolved's Thunderclap video below.
